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Popular Christianity in India explores Indian Christianity as
crafted and expressed through lived experience, providing an
important balance to currently available, typically theological,
studies. Drawing from many disciplines, this volume unearths the
multifaceted terrain of festivals, rituals, saints, miracle
workers, missionaries, and visionaries in Christian India,
providing a wonderful glimpse of its richness and complexities. The
contributors reveal the ways in which local Christian traditions
deftly challenge assumed divisions and power imbalances between
East and West, Hindu and Christian, foreign and indigenous, and
elite and local expressions. Whether forging complicated religious,
caste, and national identities, employing religious hybridity to
promote well-being, or asserting autonomy within oppressive social
and religious structures, local Christianity provides a crucial
means for its participants to manage their earthly needs and
desires.
Bridges between Worlds explores Icelandic spirit work, known as
andleg mal, which features trance and healing practices that span
earth and spirit realms, historical eras, scientific and
supernatural worldviews, and cross-Atlantic cultures. Based on
years of fieldwork conducted in the northern Icelandic town of
Akureyri, Corinne G. Dempsey excavates andleg mal's roots within
Icelandic history, and examines how this practice steeped in
ancient folklore functions in the modern world. Weaving personal
stories and anecdotes with engaging accounts of Icelandic religious
and cultural traditions, Dempsey humanizes spirit practices that
are so often demonized or romanticized. While recent years have
seen an unprecedented boom in tourist travel to Iceland, Dempsey
sheds light on a profoundly important, but thus far poorly
understood element of the country's culture. Her aim is not to
explain away andleg mal but to build bridges of comprehensibility
through empathy for the participants who are, after all, not so
different from the reader.
This book explores Icelandic spirit work, known as andleg mal,
which features trance and healing practices that span earth and
spirit realms, historical eras, and scientific and supernatural
worldviews. Based on years of fieldwork conducted in the northern
Icelandic town of Akureyri, this book excavates andleg mal's roots
in layers of Icelandic history, and examines how the practice mixes
modern science with the supernatural and even occasionally crosses
the Atlantic Ocean. Weaving personal stories and anecdotes with
accessibly written accounts of Icelandic religious and cultural
traditions, Corinne Dempsey humanizes spirit practices that are
usually demonized or romanticized. While andleg mal may appear
remote and exotic, those who practice it are not. Having endured
extremely harsh conditions until recent decades, Icelanders today
are among the most highly educated people on the planet,
well-connected to global technologies and economies. Andleg mal
practitioners are no exception, as many of them are members of
mainstream society who work day jobs and keep their spirit
involvement under wraps. For those who claim the "gift" of openness
to the spirit world, andleg mal even offers a means of daily
spiritual support, helping to diminish fear and self-doubt and
providing benefits to those on both sides of the divide.
In Bringing the Sacred Down to Earth, Corinne Dempsey offers a
comparative study of Hindu and Christian, Indian and Euro/American
earthbound religious expressions. She argues that official
religious, political, and epistemological systems tend to deny
sacred access and expression to the general populace, and are
abstracted and disembodied in ways that make them irrelevant to if
not neglectful of earthly realities. Working at cross purposes with
these systems, attending to material needs, conferring sacred
access to a wider public, and imbuing land and bodies with sacred
meaning and power, are religious frameworks featuring folklore
figures, democratizing theologies, newly sanctified land, and
extraordinary human abilities. Some scholars will see Dempsey's
juxtapositions of Hindu and Christian religious dynamics, many of
which exist on opposite sides of the globe, as a leap into a
disciplinary minefield. Many have argued for decades that
comparison is an outmoded, politically troubled approach to the
human sciences. More recently opponents, represented by a growing
number of religion scholars, are ''writing back'' in comparison's
defense, asserting the merits of a readjusted, carefully
contextualized, new comparativism. But, says Dempsey, the
inestimable advantages of the comparative method described by
religion scholars and performed in this book are disciplinary as
well as ethical. As demonstrated in this stimulating book, the
process of comparison can shed light on angles and contours
otherwise obscured and perform the important work of bridging human
contingencies and perception across religious, cultural, and
disciplinary divides.
Christianity has an ancient heritage in South India. According to tradition it was first brought to Kerala by the Apostle Thomas. Many Christian groups now coexist in Kerala, home to most of India's Christians. In this fascinating fieldwork-based study, Corinne Dempsey examines the ways in which Kerala Christians construct "hybrid" (Western and Eastern) identity in a postcolonial world. She focuses on their devotion to saints as a particularly useful point of comparison with similar devotion in European Catholicism and the indigenous Hinduism of the region.
The Goddess Lives in Upstate New York is a profile of a flourishing
Hindu temple in the town of Rush, New York. The temple, established
by a charismatic nonbrahman Sri Lankan Tamil known as Aiya, stands
out for its combination of orthodox ritual meticulousness and
socioreligious iconoclasm. The vitality with which devotees
participate in ritual themselves and their ready access to the
deities contrasts sharply with ritual activities at most North
American Hindu temples, where (following the usual Indian custom)
ritual is performed only by priests and access to the highly
sanctified divine images is closely guarded. Drawing on several
years of fieldwork, Dempsey weaves traditional South Asian tales,
temple miracle accounts, and devotional testimonials into an
analysis of the distinctive dynamics of diaspora Hinduism. She
explores the ways in which the goddess, the guru, and temple
members reside at cultural and religious intersections, noting how
distinctions between miraculous and mundane, convention and
non-convention, and domestic and foreign are more often intertwined
and interdependent than in tidy opposition. This lively and
accessible work is a unique and important contribution to diaspora
Hindu Studies.
Drawing on a variety of South Asian religious traditions -
Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity - this work focuses on
the conundrum of miracles, demonstrating how miracles can offer
divine proof, tenacious embarrassment, or both.
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